> Slowness is usually a side effect of not having correct graphics drivers for 3d acceleration / composition.
This is generally fixed by installing "non-free" firmware. Some distros may also work better than others, e.g. some hardware is better supported in Fedora than Debian or its derivatives.
This was an Intel Atom chipset with a GPU commonly found on smartphone SoCs, so there were no drivers that one could install on a mainline Linux distribution. It's really a shame that all the Android drivers are Android specific. The machine wasn't bought with Linux in mind, so the exotic hardware not working isn't really that big of a surprise. The reason Linux was installed was because the OEM Windows 10 that came with it was designed for a different market and it also eventually borked itself - complained about updates yet wasn't capable of updating itself. I got tired of trying to debug it remotely and installed linux. Hopefully with a retail license of Windows 10, we'll be able to install a pure non-crappified Windows 10 version and let it be. And the retail license will allow us to transfer it to whatever the next hardware will be.
There really is no difference between hardware support on Debian and Fedora given that the kernels remain the same - this isn't the case most of the time of course as Debian maintains stability whilst Fedora is very close to upstream most of the time.
> This was an Intel Atom chipset with a GPU commonly found on smartphone SoCs
IIRC, there was such a chipset with a PowerVR GPU. In that case, you'd pretty much be SOL. You'd have to run Windows 10 and hope that a from-scratch install of W10 can pick up the proper drivers from the "updates" channel - which I wouldn't be sure about. Most other hardware is far better behaved.
This is generally fixed by installing "non-free" firmware. Some distros may also work better than others, e.g. some hardware is better supported in Fedora than Debian or its derivatives.